"We should get our comrades to understand that the twofold basic task of the leading bodies of the Communist Party is to know conditions and to master policy; the former means knowing the world and the latter changing the world." -Mao Zedong, 1941, Reform our Study

The following editorial was originally featured in the First Nations Strategic Bulletin (FNSB), June-October 2012. You can view/download this latest edition of the FNSB by clicking the following link: FNSB June-October 2012

On September 4th the Harper government clearly signaled its intention to:

1) Focus all its efforts to assimilate First Nations into the existing federal and provincial orders of government of Canada;

2) Terminate the constitutionally protected and internationally recognized Inherent, Aboriginal and Treaty rights of First Nations.

Termination in this context means the ending of First Nations pre-existing sovereign status through federal coercion of First Nations into Land Claims and Self-Government Final Agreements that convert First Nations into municipalities, their reserves into fee simple lands and extinguishment of their Inherent, Aboriginal and Treaty Rights.

To do this the Harper government announced three new policy measures:

A “results based” approach to negotiating Modern Treaties and Self-Government Agreements. This is an assessment process of 93 negotiation tables across Canada to determine who will and who won’t agree to terminate Inherent, Aboriginal and Treaty rights under the terms of Canada’s Comprehensive Claims and Self-Government policies. For those tables who won’t agree, negotiations will end as the federal government withdraws from the table and takes funding with them.

First Nation regional and national political organizations will have their core funding cut and capped. For regional First Nation political organizations the core funding will be capped at $500,000 annually. For some regional organizations this will result in a funding cut of $1 million or more annually. This will restrict the ability of Chiefs and Executives of Provincial Territorial organization’s to organize and/or advocate for First Nations rights and interests.

First Nation Band and Tribal Council funding for advisory services will be eliminated over the next two years further crippling the ability of Chiefs and Councils and Tribal Council executives to analyze and assess the impacts of federal and provincial policies and legislation on Inherent, Aboriginal and Treaty rights.

[This 1975 article by the Bolshevik Tendency/Bolshevik Union was republished by the Encyclopedia of anti-Revisionism here and by Rowland Keshena of Speed of Dreams here. Keshena’s introduction to the article is also included below.]

This is from the magazine Canadian Revolution (No. 4, Novemeber / September 1975), which was part of the second wave of Canadian anti-revisionism, a period in the development and history of Canadian Marxism-Leninism analogous to the New Communist Movement in the United States. It was written by two unnamed members of the Bolshevik Tendency, which would soon after this piece’s publication go on to consolidate themselves as the Bolshevik Union.

The BT/BU began its life as part of the worldwide pro-Chinese movement in the 1960s and 70s, following the rise of revisionism in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Following the death of Mao and the coming to power in China of Deng Xiaoping, the BT/BU would go on to side with the Party of Labour in Albania and its leader Enver Hoxha. However, after the Albanians recognized the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), whom the BT/BU saw as revisionist, to be their fraternal party, they broke with mainstream anti-revisionism.

This article comes from the period of their alignment with the Maoist movement.